IBM Cognos Analysis For Excel (CAFE)

IBM's Cognos Analysis For Excel (CAFE) tool is quickly becoming popular among business and financial analysts. This Excel add-in is separately sold by IBM (doesn't ship with BI installation) and needs to be installed on the users' machines. It enables users to directly perform analysis in Excel with Cognos sitting as a layer between the data source and Excel.

Cognos Framework Model works as the modeling and security layer here. It allows multiple data sources to be pulled together into one business layer that is exposed in Excel using CAFE. Users can directly perform drag-and-drop, slice-and-dice operations to analyze the data.

They can put Excel calculations such as forecast on top of the figures and also create Excel charts. This brings the benefits of Cognos and Excel together and makes CAFE a killer application.

I would strongly recommend CAFE if your organization has data analysts who need to perform ad hoc analysis over data from warehouse and various other sources. You would need strong data modeling skills and this logic will sit in the Framework Model. IBM CAFE is suitable for dimensional models and Dimensionally Modeled Relational (DMR) schemas.

You can see how CAFE looks in the following screenshot:

More information about CAFE can be found on the IBM website: http://www-142.ibm.com/software/products/us/en/cognos-analysis-ms-excel.